10/15 – Modernism, Eliot
20th C & Modernism
Food, drink, apparel – changes for productivity (1920)
1905 – Einstein (myth) and Freud
1906-14 – liberal reforms (1921)
1914-1918 – WWI
1916 – Easter Rising in Ireland
1918 – women over 30 given right to vote; full right in 1928 (1922)
1922 – Irish Free State established
1930-45 – Great Depression
1936-39 – Spanish Civil War
1939-1945 – WWII
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Many C20 writers alienated in various ways (1923)
Vs. Victorians and Edwardians, taking stock of present (1924)
Modernism – why their innovations different than previous generations
(1925)
Unity / Fragmentation (1925)
Skepticism – unsure of experiments’ outcomes and of public taste (1925-26)
Social values are arbitrary constructions; sense of loss of moorings (1926)
Nietzschean revaluation of all values (1926) (cf. magazines)
“God is Dead” – transcendent standards of truth are gone (1927)
Newtonian physics overthrown – 300 years of clockwork universe – certain
and predictable – myth that after Einstein “all is relative” (1927)
o Arnold / Einstein (1928)
Mistrust in civilization and Empire (1928)
Technology “symptomatic” of modernity (1928)
Modern = post-historical? (1928)
Modernism
 Find new values, sensibilities, and styles appropriate to modern age (1929)
 Form and content (1929)
 Revolutionary style and subject matter
 Difficulty – no exposition, force reader into vicarious experience (in medias
res)
 Focus on revelatory image or moment – Imagism (1930)
o Cf. “In a Station of the Metro”
 Vs. Bourgeoise taste
 Intertextual (see Prufrock epigraph)
 Bibliographic coding – technologies of print affect text itself (cf. BLAST)
 Emphasis on modern city (1932)
 Alientation – from ourselves and each other (1934)
o Isolation, the subconscious and repressed memories
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Good quote on censorship and culture (Arnold?) (1936)
Imagism
 Poetic sensibility within the modernist movement.
 Lucid economy of phrasing (2216)
 Precision, sharpness, concreteness
 Emphasis on the visual or other sense experience, opp. the event
 Dramatic understatement
 Vs. Victorian, Edwardian, and Georgian sentimentality, ornamentation, and
moralizing tone
“In a Station of the Metro” – Poetry April 1913 (image 14)
Prufrock
Intro – paragraph on (2285)
Who is “you”? (2285, 2288)
Epigraph is from Dante’s Inferno, between Dante and Guido da Montefeltro, in 8th
circle of Hell (Fraud). Suggests fraud on Prufrock’s part, with “you” playing Dante’s
role.
"If I thought my answer were given
to anyone who would ever return to the world,
this flame would stand still without moving any further.
But since never from this abyss
has anyone ever returned alive, if what I hear is true,
without fear of infamy I answer you."
Modernity
 Dingy street scene (2288)
 Unreal, dreamlike (2288)
 Trite, empty, mediocre, full of meaningless “stuff” (13)
Culture
 Quote of Dante  Modernity is Hell
 Superficial talk of Michelangelo at party (refrain) (11, 12)
The Question (11, 12)
 Will she reject me? (13)
 Something larger as yet unexpressed? (14)
Self
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Mask/falseness (12)
Unworthy, self-deprecation (15)
No Hero
 Indecisive, no backbone or self-direction, aging (12)
 Not Hamlet (15)
Beauty
 Classical beauty unreal, fraudulent (arm hair) (13)